Kevin Harvick predicts winner for NASCAR AutoTrader EchoPark Automotive 400 at Texas

FOX Sports NASCAR analyst Kevin Harvick is all in on Bubba Wallace picking up his first Cup Series win this season in Sunday’s AutoTrader EchoPark Automotive 400 at Texas Motor Speedway.

“I’m taking Bubba,” Harvick said this week on his Happy Hour podcast.

Wallace is off to a solid start in 2024, tallying three top-5 finishes in his first eight starts. He finished P5 at Daytona and Atlanta to kick off the season before finishing P4 in this past Sunday’s Cook Out 400 at Martinsville Speedway. Wallace has three top-5 finishes in 11 starts at Texas, including a P3 result in last year’s spring race.

“They expect it. In order to do that, and run the top five and win races, you have to expect to do it. And they’re at a point where they expect to go out and perform like that,” Harvick said. “And you heard Bubba say it, I think it was last week, ‘We just need to right the ship. We just need to get some good, solid, consistent finishes,’ and they’ve done that the last two weeks. You know that car can be dangerous, if it gets on a roll and Bubba gets confident.

“We’ve all talked about it. He’s talked about it. He can kind of go through these phases of being down on himself, but that man has no reason to be down, at any point, on himself. When it’s not going good, it’s not because of him. You know it’s, ‘Hey, he needs to know that I just need to get in here, get with my team and figure it out.’ And that seems like what he said a couple of weeks ago. Is we just need to put ourselves back to some consistency. We know we can do this, we just need to go out and get it all together, and they have.”

Kevin Harvick, ‘Happy Hour’ co-hosts give their picks for Cup Series race at Texas

Harvick’s co-host, Kaitlyn Vincie, agreed with Harvick that a 23XI Racing driver would be in victory lane at Texas, though not Wallace. Vincie, making her pick, went with Tyler Reddick.

“Mine’s Tyler Reddick,” Vincie said. “He’s won before at Texas, and we’ve been talking about him. I think this is his weekend. I think Tyler Reddick gets it done.”

Fellow co-host Mamba Smith can see a scenario where Wallace gets it done at Texas but is rolling with Kyle Busch on Sunday.

“I’m gonna go a little off script… I’m gonna go with the 8 of Kyle Busch,” Smith said. “RCR has stolen races at Texas before. There’s always a late race caution… they have intermittent speed in the 8 car, so fingers crossed that we’re gonna hit it this weekend.”